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Only now does it occur to me... PARADISE ALLEY

December 4, 2014, 7:18 am
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Only now does it occur to me... that OVER THE TOP was not Stallone's first run-in with the glamorous world of arm-wrestling.

In PARADISE ALLEY, his directorial debut (it's a post-WWII, poverty-row, Hell's Kitchen, bootstrap-pullin', wrasslin' tale), Stallone acts as a manager for his brother Vic (Lee Canalito) and arranges an arm-wrestling match where the prize is a gangster's monkey.


This monkey.

His brother delivers (taking it over the top, so to speak)

and Stallone finally fulfills his lifelong dream of owning a dancing monkey.


The monkey is last seen on the street with Stallone, seriously underperforming:
Yo– look at the dancin' monkey!

Also of note:  for a movie that actually has Tom Waits in it, 

 As "Mumbles"

it's Sylvester Stallone who sings the title song, and his brother Frank who plays "Lounge Singer."

 Everybody loves Frank Stallone.

Though to be fair, the soundtrack does feature the same number (two) of Waits songs as Frank Stallone songs, with "(Meet Me In) Paradise Alley" and "Annie's Back in Town," and conjures the proper atmosphere of whiskey-fueled despondency!
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Only now does it occur to me... THE BAND WAGON

December 8, 2014, 7:15 am
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Only now does it occur to me... that Fred Astaire/Cyd Charisse/Vincente Minnelli vehicle THE BAND WAGON– one of the last great Technicolor musicals from Hollywood's golden era– could easily be refashioned as an expressionist horror film.

For instance, the number "Triplets"– which recasts full-grown adults as monstrous baby-children–


captures an uncanny sense of proportion and movement that probably belongs in a CHILD'S PLAY movie.

Later, the show-stopping "Girl Hunt Ballet" depicts a crime-laden labyrinth of candy-colored terror

 with ominous shadows at every turn,

creepy silk quasi-surgical masks,
rooms packed with nearly as many mannequin heads as TOURIST TRAP,

 I need a closer look at that...


 My God, WHY?!

 
 Real heads, too?  And what's with the terrifying papier-maché Freddy Krueger head beside him?!  I'll be seeing that rictus grin in my nightmares!

and violence meted out at every turn by hordes of identical noir villains, whose choreographed uniformity and overwhelming force of numbers feel like a more existential threat, like something out of a Kafka story.  Hell, they probably work for the same government that's depicted in THE TRIAL.

I mean, look at the effect all this has on Astaire.
That's not a man in a musical comedy– that's a man gazing deeply into a Lovecraftian abyss.  And I really appreciate that.
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Only now does it occur to me... MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME

March 4, 2015, 9:31 pm
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Only now does it occur to me... that Mel Gibson's entire directorial output may have been inspired by his experiences on set of MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME.  It has facial disfigurements like THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE, the majestic and patriotic Gibson-wig from BRAVEHEART:

torture and desert suffering like PASSION OF THE CHRIST:



Mayan fashion and gauntlets of brutality like APOCALYPTO:

and I see Gibson even has a new film in pre-production called HACKSAW RIDGE, and I gotta say– MAD MAX has always had plenty of hacksaws!  Clearly, therefore, the auteurist "Genesis," if you will, of the Gibsonian worldview was born... in the THUNDERDOME!

Speaking of which, the Thunderdome is terrific.
It's like TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE meets BLOODSPORT at a postapocalyptic S&M dungeon...
Is that a human catapult/sex swing?

...though I have to tell you, for a movie called BEYOND THUNDERDOME, there's only one scene set in the Thunderdome.  Bit of a disappointment, there: I wanted a full, feature-length Aussie/Ozzie kumite.

This is a fascinating film, however; and while it's possibly the weakest of the MAD MAX trilogy, it's never uninteresting– it's like Terry Gilliam and Alejandro Jodorowsky collaborated on an 80s grindhouse flick that thinks it's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (they even hired the legendary Maurice Jarre to do the score, and he inexplicably quotes LAWRENCE, WEST SIDE STORY, and the "Klingon Theme" from STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES)
and then somebody invited Tina Turner to the party, telling her to wear Princess Leia-cocktail strainer buns and a chainlink shirt (as opposed to the chainlink sweater from COMMANDO)

and she forces Mel Gibson audition to be her backup dancer (or maybe it was her assassin?  all I remember is that she said "You're the first to survive the audition!").  

Anyway, that's just about all I have to say, except to add that there's an actor in it whose first name is "Angry" (Angry Anderson, singer and activist), and that counts for something.  Here's hoping for an eventual sequel called, MAD MAX: 100% THUNDERDOME.
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Film Review: XXX (2002, Rob Cohen)

March 11, 2015, 10:13 am
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Stars: XXX of 5.
Running Time: 124 minutes.
Tag-line: "A New Breed of Secret Agent."
Notable Cast or Crew: Starring Vin Diesel (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, PITCH BLACK), Asia Argento (LAND OF THE DEAD, TRAUMA), Marton Csokas (THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS), Samuel L. Jackson (PULP FICTION, UNBREAKABLE), Danny Trejo (DESPERADO, MACHETE), Thomas Ian Griffith (VAMPIRES, BEHIND ENEMY LINES), Eve (BARBERSHOP, THE WOODSMAN), and Tony Hawk.  Music by Randy Edelman (KINDERGARTEN COP, GHOSTBUSTERS II).  A soundtrack featuring Rammstein, Drowning Pool, Hatebreed, Joi, Flaw, Orbital, Mushroomhead, N.E.R.D., and other 90s bands you may have forgotten.
Best One-liner:  "Welcome to the Xander Zone."

The bastard child of James Bond and the X-treme sports fad, I had long avoided XXX, largely because it was not made during the 1980s, the golden period of cheesy action.  How foolish I was!  For a movie named after Vin Diesel's (fictional) tattoo and featuring a gang of villains named Anarchy 99, it is surprisingly palatable.

 I have no idea if I would have liked this as much if I'd seen it when it came out in 2002, but XXX has aged like a fine wine.  Or at least like a wine in comic strip that's served in a bottle marked "XXX."

From the director of THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR, DRAGONHEART, and DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY (Rob Cohen, the man who directs movies with the word 'Dragon' in the title more often than any comparable director), XXX is a spectacular undercover glimpse into the exclusive world of Eurotrash rave culture and high-level secret government operations.  Here are eight things I liked about it:

#1.  Asia Argento.

Cult, horror, and Italo-trash legend, she's essentially why I decided to watch this in the first place.  And yet this was her first foray into a major Hollywood film.  Why 2002?  Why XXX?  I figured it out: it's not that Asia had to wait around for Hollywood to find a trashy role; Hollywood had to wait until Asia decided they'd come up with a movie trashy enough to meet her rigorous trash standards.
Here she is, pretending to dance, on all the drugs.

Throughout, she maintains a consistency of performance, even (especially?) when her scene partner is the impressively wooden and hilariously flat Vin Diesel.

Don't scowl, Asia––he's still better than most of the cast of DRACULA 3D.

She's technically the "Bond girl," but in a movie this trashy, I say she's the star.


#2.  I mean, the opening scene is a Rammstein concert in a Euro-cathedral, where a man is assassinated and then crowd-surfed amid gouts of flame and other pyrotechnics.


They shot James Bond?

Later, there are more raves and tesla coils and techno music.

This picture could not exist without the subtitle "Techno Music Playing."

And cranberry club sodas.
Er, what––

#3.  Let's take a moment to talk about Vin Diesel and that wondrous jacket, shall we?

Yes, that furry-collared jacket (complete with a stylishly gaudy medallion) appears in roughly an entire third of the film, which leads me to believe they thought it was quite the trendy fashion statement.  It's nearly as great as Kramer's in that one SEINFELD episode where he's mistaken for a pimp.

Highest marks.  But who is Vin Diesel's Xander "xXx" Cage?"  Who is he really?  What makes him tick, besides cranberry sodas and furry collars and stilted line readings?


#4.  xXx is a crusading everyman.  He talks straight into little video cameras (addressing the nation?) and makes confessional rants about "The Man" and video games and explicit song lyrics.   He is an iconoclast, a man of letters, a philosopher.


But when it comes to solving problems, where Plato used the Socratic method, xXx uses... X-treme sports.  In fact, you could say that is the main thrust of the film is the use of X-treme sports to solve matters of international diplomacy and intrigue.

Whether it's X-treme Dirtbiking:

Thank God there happened to be an offroad crotchrocket lying around.

X-treme Rockclimbing:

"Get a grip!"

X-treme Para-snowboarding:


X-treme Regular Snowboarding:

"Nothing like fresh powder!"–an actual line in this sequence

X-treme Para-sailing:


And, my personal favorite, X-Treme Silver Platter:

which leads to X-Treme Silver Platter-Skateboarding:

Pictured: a typical European street scene.

And yet all of these personality traits make the following even more satisfying (albeit briefly):


#4.  Danny Trejo, with a machete, torturing Vin Diesel.


This is the sort of thing that's worth the price of admission, even if it only lasts for two minutes.  And look at Danny Trejo, boldly transitioning from "Prisoner" to "Guy with Machete."  But, oh, he does it well.


#5.  Potato Explosion!  This is the best potato-related car chase sequence explosion since the one in PET SEMATARY TWO.



"Now that's what I call a 'tater crater.'"  –not my proudest moment


#6.  Facial-scarred Sam Jackson phoning in––nay, mailing in––a performance as the 'M' of this universe, comparing Mr. Diesel to a snake


Technically, in this context, said 'snake' would be on a plane––and four years before they made the movie!

and delivering a hearty (and self-referential?) slow clap when Vin Diesel does what he didn't in PULP FICTION––kick the asses of some stick-up artists in a retro diner:

Not quite as good as the slow clap in ROCKY IV.


#7.  And continuing with the James Bond analogy, there's also a 'Q' scene, with all the requisite gadgets.  Though, when Vin Diesel tries out the X-ray binoculars,

it bears mentioning that he briefly becomes XXX: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.


#8.  The Xander Zone.

I think this is a good note to end on.  Amen.

–Sean Gill


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Only now does it occur to me... WATERSHIP DOWN

March 16, 2015, 1:22 pm
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Only now does it occur to me...  that out of every hardboiled caper, martial arts tournament film, bloody shoot 'em up, or gritty gang movie of the 1970s, the most badass tagline of the decade just might belong to an animated film about rabbits.

Seriously, though:
"All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you...
But first they must catch you." 

(It also bears mentioning that this is a wonderful, poetic, brutal work, a true labor of love from its makers, and one of the all-time great animated films.  I advise you to check out the recent Criterion release, as well as another, lesser-known film from the same novelist/director/vocal talent, called THE PLAGUE DOGS.)
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Only now does it occur to me... THE OTHER

March 20, 2015, 7:40 am
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Only now does it occur to me... that THE OTHER (1972) is sort of the missing link between SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (the novel, 1962) and PHANTASM (1979).

Like Ray Bradbury's best work, it's saturated with boyhood nostalgia, tinged with creeping dread, and peppered with dark carnivals and secret hideouts and fleeting bucolic pleasures, like cattail fluff drifting in the summer breeze.
 
Bradbury-esque summer fancy...

...and secret foreboding.

Like PHANTASM, it has a disorienting sense of unreality and a flair for the grotesquely nostalgia; i.e., the graveyard as a site of childish fancy (before true horror is revealed)
Graveyard playtime in PHANTASM...

...interrupted by harsher truths in THE OTHER.

or the sentimental revealed to contain the unspeakable––say, a severed finger in a child's treasure box:
THE OTHER.

PHANTASM.

A dear friend recommended THE OTHER to me during my "Melancholy Horror" kick (mostly chronicled here in "Junta Juleil's Guide to Melancholy Horror," which is probably due for a part two at this point), and it's quite good.  Based on a novel by the same name by writer/actor Tom Tryon, it's not easy to define without giving too much away––but in addition to what I've already described, I'll say that it traffics in the "freaky children" subgenre, such as THE OMEN or the classic TWILIGHT ZONE "It's a Good Life," 
 
ancestral horrors reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft,
 
and a Gothic ghostly atmosphere out of THE INNOCENTS or THE HAUNTING.
There's wonderfully evocative cinematography throughout by Robert Surtees (BEN-HUR, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, THE GRADUATE), 
 
an understated, eerie score by Jerry Goldsmith (ALIEN, GREMLINS), and workmanlike direction from Robert Mulligan (TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, INSIDE DAISY CLOVER).  I also have to give a nod to the legendary Uta Hagen as a mysterious, old-country Grandmother, and to John Ritter who appears in essentially a bit part:

In all, it's a solid work of melancholy horror from the golden period; far from flawless, but with an impeccable, hazy atmosphere, and enough twists and turns to confound your initial expectations. 

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Only now does it occur to me... COMPANY OF KILLERS

December 21, 2014, 10:40 pm
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Only now does it occur to me...  that while COMPANY OF KILLERS is a fairly dull, run-of-the-mill 70s TV police procedural, amid depressed Ray Milland,

I feel your pain, Ray

a sleepy Fritz Weaver,

I know it ain't CREEPSHOW, but run it up the flagpole, man!

and a hardboiled but bland John Saxon (doing a weird, sorta old-country accent),

He plays– no joke– an assassin named... "Poohler"

is an incredibly likable Clu Gulager performance as "Frank Quinn," a persistent and wacky newspaper reporter who cracks wise and offers people the opportunity to pull out his tonsils.

He's always chewing on things and messing around with unexpected bits of acting business, as is his way.  You get the idea he's actually having some fun in the middle of all this crap, which is more than can be said for anyone else.  Good goin', Clu!

(And for those who are not acquainted, you can read more about my love of all things Gulager here, and a little more about the saga of his artistic family here.)
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Television Review: CHRISTMAS AT PEE WEE'S PLAYHOUSE (1988, Wayne Orr & Paul Reubens)

December 25, 2014, 9:48 am
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Stars: 5 of 5.
Running Time: 49 minutes.
Tag-line: None.
Notable Cast or Crew: Paul Reubens (PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER), Annette Funicello (BABES IN TOYLAND, BEACH PARTY), Frankie Avalon (GREASE, DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE), Grace Jones (A VIEW TO A KILL, VAMP), k.d. lang, Dinah Shore, Little Richard, Cher, Magic Johnson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Whoopi Goldberg (FATAL BEAUTY, THE CELEBRITY GUIDE TO WINE), Oprah Winfrey, Joan Rivers,  Charo, Laurence Fishburne (APOCALYPSE NOW, BOYZ N THE HOOD), Chairry, Floory, Globey, Conky 2000, Clockey, Magic Screen, Pterri, Mr. Window, Dirty Dog, Cool Cat, Chicky Baby, Randy, Billy Baloney, the Dinosaur Family, and The Flowers.
Best One-liner:  "That was Cher!  Cher was right over there!  In the same room as my chair!  I hope I didn't stare!  Oh well!  I don't care!"
Secret Word: "Year."

Now this was an 11th Hour Christmas Eve recommendation from my sister, who let me know it was streaming on Netflix.  And holy cow, what an embarrassment of festive, camp-tastic riches!  Occasionally subversive for a children's program, it uses its substantial powers to celebrate diversity and kitsch in something approaching equal quantities.  It's madness down the line, but for the moment, let me regale you with the top seven most amazingly absurd moments in CHRISTMAS AT PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE:

#7.  The opening tableau, which involves sequined back-up singers and the UCLA Glee Club men's choir dressed as U.S. Marines in dress blues
 
cavorting in the background and ultimately hoisting Pee Wee into the camera lens where he caterwauls impressively.

#6.  L.A. Laker Magic Johnson shows up inside the Magic Screen


because Magic Johnson is cousins with the Magic Screen.  Later, they are chased by a cartoon polar bear:


#5.  Pee Wee forces Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon into a form of slave labor, the arts n' craftsy task at hand being to construct his Christmas cards.



Later, for all their efforts, he serves them bread and water.


#4.  Whoa-oh-oh!  Cher drops by to mess around with Conky and determine the Word of the Day, which is "YEAR."

Pee Wee then proceeds to make a variety of Cher-related puns.


This represents the content and flavor of the entire show condensed into a single freeze frame.

#3.  Little Richard minces in, flustered by his own inability to ice skate.

Pee Wee then delights Little Richard with a deft display of ice-skating.



However, the use of stunt double "Hans" saddens Little Richard, who pouts in disappointment.


#2.  There is an ongoing gag about Pee Wee receiving unwanted fruitcakes.  Naturally, he sets two beefcake-y construction workers to building him a tower out of them.


 Literally a tower of fruitcakes.

#1.  A crate is delivered by mistake to Pee Wee.

It is intended for then-lame duck President Ronald Reagan.

The crate contains Grace Jones, who is wearing a bizarro foam outfit with sculpted breast-molds, because of course she is.

Pee Wee attempts to repackage Grace Jones,


 but she insists on singing "The Little Drummer Boy" while she strips off her fur and gloves as if proceeding into a burlesque number

while Pee Wee himself sits on a tiny chair in childlike euphoria throughout.

Unfortunately, no one has ever accidentally delivered Grace Jones to my house.

I feel as if I have only scratched the surface here (I didn't even get to Charo, Whoopi, Oprah, or Laurence Fishburne!), and invite you, too, to visit this, which may very well be the most willfully insane of all the 80s Christmas specials.  (You'll note that the STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL is from the 70s.)  Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and here's to a tremendous New Year!

That's the secret word!  AHHHHHHHHHH!

–Sean Gill
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Only now does it occur to me... MAVERICK

March 24, 2015, 11:01 am
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Only now does it occur to me... that MAVERICK is a real "Donner Party."  By that, I don't mean that it involves cannibalism, torture, or Mel Gibson Jesus-poses,
Though if this isn't in his contract, I'll eat my hat.

instead I mean that its director, Richard Donner, has packed the film with actors and references from other "Donner" films.

Obviously, it stars Mel Gibson (of 4 Donner LETHAL WEAPONS and a CONSPIRACY THEORY), but there's plenty more where that came from.

Margot Kidder (Donner's SUPERMAN 1 & 2, he also produced her appearances in TALES FROM THE CRYPT and DELIRIOUS) shows up as a grouchy spinster obsessed with a stolen wedding dress:

Alfred Molina (Donner's LADYHAWKE) appears as a recurring villain and instrument of Gibson-torture:

Stephen Kahan ("Captain Murphy" from all 4 LETHAL WEAPONS, but also appeared in Donner's SUPERMAN, INSIDE MOVES, THE TOY, SCROOGED, CONSPIRACY THEORY, 16 BLOCKS, RADIO FLYER, TIMELINE and a few TALES FROM THE CRYPTs) plays a riverboat card dealer, who shares an unusual interaction with Mel Gibson, whereupon he congratulates him on his win (with familiarity), and takes the chair with him as he stands, prompting Mel to nearly crack up.

Then, for the piéce de résistance:  Mel Gibson and Geoffrey Lewis are shootin' the shit inside a bank when three robbers bust in to relieve them of their wallets and blow the safe.  The lead robber piques Mel Gibson's interest and there is a note of recognition.
 
He pulls down the robber's bandana to reveal Murtaugh himself, Danny Glover:
And to the strains of the LETHAL WEAPON theme, they share a moment, then decide––nahh, this ridiculous.  Glover goes on his way, revealing the rest of his gang:
Corey Feldman (of Donner's THE GOONIES, and the Donner-produced THE LOST BOYS and BORDELLO OF BLOOD), country musician Hal Ketchum, and apparently transportation coordinator John M. Woodward, who coordinated such on LETHAL WEAPONS 2-4, CONSPIRACY THEORY, and TIMELINE.  I think that qualifies as a Donner Party!

Oh yeah, and even in the Wild West, Danny Glover is getting...
...too old for this shit.


BONUS QUIZ:  Can you identify which of the following pictures are screen captures from MAVERICK (featuring the lush cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond), and which are Western Americana picture postcards?

A.


B.

C.

D.

E.






It's a cheap trick question––they're all screen captures from MAVERICK!


PS––and apparently, the brilliant Linda Hunt (THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, THE BOSTONIANS, KINDERGARTEN COP) and my fave glam rocker Alice Cooper had their scenes deleted (damn!) as "The Magician" and "The Town Drunk," respectively.
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Coming Soon: Ernest Borgnine Week!

March 27, 2015, 9:00 am
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I mean, every week is kind of Ernest Borgnine Week.  So this will be like every week, only moreso.
Could you say "no" to that face?




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Film Review: EMPEROR OF THE NORTH (1973, Robert Aldrich)

March 30, 2015, 10:11 am
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Stars: 5 of 5.
Running Time: 118 minutes.
Tag-line: "Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine Meet in the Fight of the Century!"
Notable Cast or Crew:  Lee Marvin (THE KILLERS, THE DELTA FORCE, THE DIRTY DOZEN), Ernest Borgnine (MARTY, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE DIRTY DOZEN), Keith Carradine (THE DUELLISTS, NASHVILLE), Charles Tyner (COOL HAND LUKE, HAROLD & MAUDE), Malcolm Atterbury (THE BIRDS, RIO BRAVO), Simon Oakland (PSYCHO, WEST SIDE STORY), Elisha Cook Jr. (ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE MALTESE FALCON), Sid Haig (SPIDER BABY, COFFY), and an uncredited Lance Henriksen (ALIENS, THE TERMINATOR).  Written by Christopher Knopf (20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, HELL BENT FOR LEATHER) and based on a short story by Jack London.  Directed by Robert Aldrich (WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, THE DIRTY DOZEN, KISS ME DEADLY).
Best One-liner: "You have as much a chance as a one-legged man at an asskicking contest!"

This movie's sleazier'n a bumfight in August, redder'n a hot poker, and madder'n a hobo gettin' whipped with a chain!  It's sweaty, dirty, and foamin' at the mouth.  The concept behind this film is as ridiculous as it is brilliant:  Ernest Borgnine is 'Shack'- a railroad man who'll risk his life to kill any bum who tries to hitch a free ride.

Lee Marvin is A-Number 1, a bum who lives by the bum's code, and will risk his life, just on principle, to hitch a free ride on any and every train.  
Keith Carradine is A-Number 1's protege who may or may not have what it takes to be "EmperoroftheNorth Pole."

This movie is dripping with testosterone, tobacco juice, and blood; it calls hobos "hoboes" in an opening crawl that seems culled from a MAD MAX movie––

it features an uncredited Lance Henriksen (I think I blinked and missed him) and a young Sid Haig:

and the entire affair is as brutal as a 2x4 thwack to the guts.  And that thwack just might be accompanied by some gentle honkytonk piano.  Wait a second. Did I just see some street urchins get beaten with a live chicken by Lee Marvin?  You bet I did.



A statistically insignificant amount of animals and children were harmed in this production.

And wait for the scene where Lee, holding a live, purloined turkey, taunts a cop who asks him what he's doing with the bird.


Lee insists it's his pet dog, who's offended by the comparison to a turkey, and could the officer please...bark...now.  The now-terrified policeman quickly complies with some bow-wowing,

and Lee lets loose with a priceless facial expression that can only mean 'You'd better start barking better.'

I feel as if this is the movie that set the'Sons of Lee Marvin' (a fan club formed by Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Jim Jarmusch, Iggy Pop, Neil Young, John Lurie) into motion.  I'd say it's a huge influence on Jarmusch's DEAD MAN, for one.

The whole thing leads up to a merciless conclusion––a no-holds-barred fight between Shack and A-Number 1 that involves hammers, spikes, axes, 2x4s, chains, and the train itself.  It's one ofthe most visceral battles in cinema.




It, and this entire film, are a credit to director Robert Aldrich (WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, THE DIRTY DOZEN, KISS ME DEADLY)'s ability to merge action and character study; Lee Marvin's sheer, enduring, haggard presence; Ernest Borgnine's twisted, gnarled, vile energy; and the ability of all three to collaborate in a manner where somehow nothing strains your suspension of disbelief.  God bless this movie.  Five stars.

–Sean Gill
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Film Review: CODE NAME: WILD GEESE (1984, Antonio Marghereti)

April 2, 2015, 8:04 am
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Stars: 2.5 of 5.
Running Time: 101 minutes.
Tag-line: "This is a corporation of businessmen.  Their business is war.  For them, the jungle and the city are the same."
Notable Cast or Crew: Lee Van Cleef (THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY; ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK), Klaus Kinski (AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD; DOCTOR ZHIVAGO), Ernest Borgnine (MARTY, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK), Mimsy Farmer (FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, MORE), Lewis Collins (KOMMANDO LEOPARD, CONFESSIONS OF A DRIVING INSTRUCTOR).  Directed by Antonio Marghereti (YOR THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE, CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE).
Best One-liner: "You find them, and make it slow. I want them to suffer. And then...take PICTURES!"

So you send your buddy down to Drug Mart with 50¢ to grab THE WILD GEESE on VHS with Richard Burton.  Instead, he comes back with this. We're far beyond the point where Margheriti and his Campari-swilling cronies are making any money off of that rental, but, the question is, what arethey getting out of it? I would propose that (like every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings) maybe every time a piece of plagiaristic Italo-trash gets mistakenly rented, Fabio Testi gets another pair of tight jeans?

Regardless, this is pretty terrible. The quality is bootleg-level horrid, the action is boring, the characters bland, the editing stale.  It's the kind of flick that makes Michael Winner look like Orson Welles. It features a fairly awful Jan Nemec/Eloy score––kinda Christopher Cross meets De Angelis. Most everyone seems to have done their own dubbing, but Kinski must've thrown a tantrum in post, cause he's been dubbed by a stuffy English gent, which is just plain whacky.
 
Good day to you, sir

Then Mimsy Farmer shows up about 50 minutes in to ruin our lives.  But there's a lot of schweet things going on as well: Lee van Cleef with a Rambo-bandana as the badass prisoner sprung for the mission (in a role reversal from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK),

Science cannot explain my irrational dislike for Mimsy Farmer (shoulda been Grace Jones)

Ernest Borgnine doing his patented "Borgnine-grin,"


Truly Kinski's madness holds no power in the face of a Borgnine-grin


Kinski's machine gun versus Lee van Cleef's flamethrower-spewing helicopter,



Even the prospect of attacking Kinski with a flying flamethrower does not excite Lee van Cleef

the operation at hand is called "Operation: Cleaning," there's a generic villain named 'Khan' ("You find them, and make it slow. I want them to suffer. And then...take PICTURES!"), and the line "That's Americans for you! The only serious thing we've ever done is revolt against your king, since then, it's just been Hollywood, Hollywood..."

This movie's full of head-scratchers––like the Eskimo kiss/forehead rub van Cleef does with Mimsy at the end.

Not sure where this came from.

And where does this guy keep getting ice cold Buds in the middle of the jungle?

I'm reminded of the finale of DELTA FORCE––beers for everybody!

Why do the silenced gunshots sound like a pinball ricochets? How does a car drive sideways along the wall of a tunnel?
 
 
 
 
 
This is truly one of the more majestic scenes in film history: Lewis Collins, while driving his car in a tunnel, swerves to avoid some construction and drives sideways down the tunnel wall (in miniature) for a good forty-five seconds as Ernest Borgnine tries to wrap his head around it, in vain.

Still, this is far from being the worst that Italy has to offer.  I cheerfully give it two and a half stars.

–Sean Gill
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Book Review: SPLINTER OF THE MIND'S EYE (1978, Alan Dean Foster)

December 29, 2014, 6:43 am
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Stars:  3 of 5.
Length:  199 pages.
Publisher:  Del Rey/Ballantine, NY.
Tag-line: "Stranded on a jungle planet, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia found themselves desperately racing Imperial stormtroopers to claim a gem that had mysterious powers over THE FORCE"

Now this is a true curiosity.  A quickie paperback sequel to STAR WARS that used inside info of George Lucas' original drafts of the script (with his blessing) to build a smaller, more intimate storyline that might have been the actual movie sequel to STAR WARS had the first film not been such a resounding success.

The plot follows Luke, Leia, C-3PO, and R2-D2 as they travel to the Circarpous system to spread the Rebellion and recover a mysterious force-focusing crystal on the planet Mimban.  Darth Vader makes a brief appearance at the end, also hunting for the crystal.  Ben Kenobi is mentioned a few times, though Han and Chewbacca are nowhere to be found (Han warrants one mention only, on the penultimate page, when Luke argues in passing, "I know another man, a smuggler and a pirate, who once thought the same way as you.").  

It's a strange, quick read (it's one of those books you can finish in an hour and a half) that feels sort of quaint (droids are persistently called 'droids throughout, for instance) in light of the actual STAR WARS sequels, and any die hard fan will find much amusement in its pages.  Therefore, without further ado, here are my ten strangest/most hideous/favorite things about SPLINTER OF THE MIND'S EYE:

#10.  The level of self-seriousness.  First off, the title: SPLINTER OF THE MIND'S EYE.  It's already striving for something greater than "STAR WARS." STAR WARS gets straight to the point: you got yer stars, you got yer wars, and there you go.  "SPLINTER OF THE MIND'S EYE" sounds partway between a Tennessee Williams play and a Daphne Du Maurier short story and a Philip K. Dick novel. This seriousness sometimes extends to the prose.  For instance, the opening line had me chuckling out loud:

"How beautiful was the universe, Luke thought.  How beautifully flowing, glorious, and aglow like the robe of a queen."

Now, in context, the first movie began with pew-pew laser-blastin' spacecraft screaming across a field of stars...  that I've always considered to be much like like the robe of a queen.

Pictured: the robe of a queen.


#9.  The names.  Alan Dean Foster definitely nails Lucas' (more recent) propensity for unwieldy names:  Circarpousians, Kaiburr Crystals, The Temple of Pomojema, Captain-Supervisor Grammel...  er– Captain-Supervisor Grammel?  Seriously?  There is no precedent in the first film for the rank of Captain-Supervisor.  That's unwieldiness for unwieldiness' sake. And I kinda like that.

#8.  So much Luke and Leia romance.  SO MUCH LUKE AND LEIA ROMANCE.

This was more than enough already.

I realize that they peck in STAR WARS and kiss in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and that we don't know their actual sibling relationship until halfway through RETURN OF THE JEDI, but in retrospect this stuff is extraordinarily awkward, and most of it feels culled from a trashy Harlequin paperback:
"The other [Leia]...  whenever he looked at her, the other caused emotions to boil within him like soup too long on the fire, no matter if she was separated from him by near vacuum as at present or by only an arm's length in a conference room."

"Awkwardly pressed up against him, the Princess seemed to take no notice of their proximity.  In the dampness, though, her body heat was near palpable to Luke and he had to force himself to keep his attention on what he was doing."
"Disheveled and caked with mud from the waist down, she was still beautiful."

Luke does some sleeper creepin':

"It was not the face of a Princess and a Senator or a leader of the Rebel Alliance, but instead that of a chilled child.  Moistly parted in sleep, her lips seemed to beckon to him.  He leaned closer, seeking refuge from the damp green and brown of the swamp in the hypnotic redness."

At one point Luke and Leia must (?!) undress in front of each other:

"She put her hands on seal-curve hips, cocked her head to one side and stared meaningfully at him.  'Oh,' he murmured, half-smiling.  He turned away and continued undressing."

At another point, in a great leap forward for gender relations, Leia must role-play as Luke's servant-girl in order to fool the local authorites:

"He thought furiously.  'No, she's... uh, I bought her.'  Leia twitched, stared at him a moment before returning resolutely to her food.  'Yes, she's a servant of mine.  Spent all my earnings on her.' ... Her shoulders shook.  'But she was the best I could afford.  And she's kind of amusing to have around, though she tends to get out of line at times and I have to slap her down.'

#7.  As a writer myself, I'm always on the lookout for bad sentences, the sort that jut out of the page and fall straight on their faces.  Usually, they are ambitious sentences; a simple sentence has fewer ways in which it can go wrong.  In any event, bad sentences can happen to good writers, and Alan Dean Foster is no exception:

"While most of it tasted like reprocessed X-Wing fuselage insulation, a couple of the subterranean gourmet delights were downright flavorful."
"We could find ourselves marooned forever on this empty world, without companionship, without knowledge tapes, without... without lubricants!"

"She did as she was told, the motion generating squelching sounds from the bog."

"Air!  Most delicious of gases, it filled his starved lungs, those weakened bellows pumping harder with every fresh breath."

"Swear it!" She [Leia] demanded, her voice that of a steel kitten."

#6.  Pre-Yoda speak.  At one point, Luke pontificates, "Survive we will, if the Force is with us."  The man hasn't even met Yoda yet!


#5.  Lovecraft references.  At one point, beloved Lovecraft descriptors like "eldritch,""stygian,""abyssal," and  "sepulchral" appear within the same paragraph.  The only one missing is "Cyclopean."  As they say, everybody loves Lovecraft.


#4.  Brief social commentary.  On the planet Mimban, the underclass' plight is addressed:
"She gestured, and they saw the degraded, crawling beggars pleading with patrons for a chance to perform the most servile acts in return for a sip of alcohol."
Holy shit– Imperial policies have created a society of deviant hobo drunks!

The STAR WARS universe and this guy seem like they'd be a good fit.


#3.  After cutting off a ruffian's hand with his lightsaber, the Mimban locals give Luke the nickname "Saberman." Boy, I wish that name would've stuck!

"Use the force, Saberman."


#2.  Foster is forced to expand on little throwaway bits from the first movie because at this point, it represents the entirety of his source text.  Some of these are actually well-developed.

For instance, Leia is basically suffering PTSD from her encounter with the interrogation droid in the first STAR WARS movie. ("Small black worms crawled through her brain...the machine drifting into her holding cell.  The remorseless black machine, illegal, concocted by twisted Imperial scientists in defiance of every code, legal and moral... Screaming, screaming, screaming never to stop she was...").

Later, she makes Luke promise to murder her ("put that saber at your hip to my throat") if she's captured by Vader, because she won't be taken alive again.

Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) mentions the Emperor disbanding the Imperial Senate in the first STAR WARS.  In SPLINTER OF THE MIND'S EYE, Foster tries to address how this is putting undue pressure on the local system Governors, who no longer have Senate infrastructure and don't always have access to Imperial military.  While it's kind of bureaucratic in a PHANTOM MENACE kind of way, I appreciate the effort.


#2.  Darth Vader is a total perv.  I guess the dudes's always been into leather and bondage and asphyxiation and could definitely fit in with the gas mask fetishists.

I would never say that his cape reminded me of the robe of a queen, however.

Maybe this whole time his cape has really been just one big handkerchief indicating what sorts of scenes he's into.

Would you say, "leather daddy?"

Anywho, in SPLINTER OF THE MIND'S EYE, while fighting Princess Leia Vader says the following:
"'Foolish infant.  The Force is with me, not you.'  But, he [Vader] shrugged amiably, "we will see."  He assumed a position of readiness.  'Come, girl-woman... amuse me.'"
Er–  did you really just say that?

"Yes," Vader observed, perverse amusement in his voice, "I can see that you do.  I am truly sorry I have nothing as elaborate to treat you to at this time.  'However,'  he added, swinging his weapon lightly, 'one can do some interesting things with a saber, you know.  I'll do my best to show you all of them if you'll cooperate by not passing out.'
WHAT!?!


In lieu of comment, I will simply remind you that we never really knew what went on inside that chamber.


#1.  Okay, so we seem to have a mix of progressive and backward thinking running throughout this book.  It takes a hardline stance on torture and Imperial hobo policy, but on servant-girl fantasy and daddy-daughter-dance protocol, it's a tad sexist.

Let me back that up: it becomes a plot element that Princess Leia can't swim.  And Luke can.  Luke, who spent the entirety of his life thus far on a desert planet.  As in, "lacking in bodies of water whatsoever." From our brief glimpse of Leia's planet Alderaan before it's destroyed,

we can see that it's at least 75% water.  Plus, Leia clearly had Alderaanian dressage tauntauns and palace diving pools and water polo lessons and lakeshore property and sailing lessons and summer homes and all that jazz, and you don't experience all that without learning how to swim.

In SPLINTER OF THE MIND'S EYE, Luke demonstrates his lifeguarding skills on Leia and she says, "I'm sorry I was so much trouble.  I'm sorry I did so much screaming.  I... usually have better control of myself than that."  In the first STAR WARS movie we saw Leia survive torture, murder a stormtrooper at point-blank range while his blaster was set to 'stun,' and coordinate a war room.  She's a two-fisted Hawksian heroine, for sure, and she doesn't need a farm boy to fish her out of a swamp.

At least she gets to take on Darth Vader with Luke's– I mean Saberman's– lightsaber at the end, but she only holds him to a draw till Luke can extract himself from the rock that has pinned him. Luke finishes the battle but cutting off Vader's arm and knocking him down a mineshaft, which is a pretty stock ending, but what are you gonna do.

Three stars.

–Sean Gill
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Film Review: LICENCE TO KILL (1989, John Glen)

January 5, 2015, 6:49 am
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Stars: 3.8 of 5.
Running Time: 133 minutes.
Tag-line: "His bad side is a dangerous place to be."
Notable Cast or Crew:  Timothy Dalton (THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS, HOT FUZZ), Carey Lowell (DOWN TWISTED, DANGEROUSLY CLOSE), Robert Davi (DIE HARD, THE GOONIES), Talisa Soto (Kitana in MORTAL KOMBAT and MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION), Anthony Zerbe (THE DEAD ZONE, STEEL DAWN), Frank McRae (LAST ACTION HERO, 48 HRS.), Wayne Newton (TALES FROM THE CRYPT), Benicio Del Toro (THE USUAL SUSPECTS, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS), Everett McGill (TWIN PEAKS, SILVER BULLET, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS), Desmond Llewelyn ('Q' from FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE through THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, from 1963 to 1999), Grand L. Bush (LETHAL WEAPON, DIE HARD).  Music by Michael Kamen (LETHAL WEAPON, DIE HARD).
Best One-liner:  "God, what a terrible waste... of money."

LICENCE TO KILL might be the meanest of all the Bond films, feeling at times more like a DEATH WISH sequel or a spin-off of SCARFACE.  It's by no means a top-tier James Bond film, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.  The plot is thus: after his longtime CIA buddy Felix Leiter becomes mutilated and widower'ed on his honeymoon, Bond goes rogue, has his license to kill revoked, and hunts down the drug lord (classic 80s character actor villain Robert Davi) responsible.  As I said, it's quite mean-spirited, and is chock full of severed limbs, non-consensual BDSM, exploding heads, torture, and all sorts of other stuff you wouldn't expect in a Bond film.  There was a gung ho wave of anti-drug paramilitary-ism in the late 80s and early 90s with so many franchises turning in a cartel-related installment:  DEATH WISH gave us DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN, DIRTY HARRY gave us THE DEAD POOL, DELTA FORCE gave us DELTA FORCE 2: THE COLUMBIAN CONNECTION, the Jack Ryan series gave us CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, and the James Bond series gave us LICENCE TO KILL.  I could go on.

Now, what about those beloved minutiae– the strange little happenings and unexpected appearances that make 80s action movies so enjoyable for me?   Well, here are my top nine such moments in LICENCE TO KILL:

#9.  Ninjas fly down from the rafters and start shooting nets out of their sleeves like Spiderman slings web.



No, this isn't a Cannon Film, and no, they don't appear in any other scene.

#8.  Q's finest gadget by far in this film (compare to his last great offering, "The Ghetto Blaster" in THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS) is a Polaroid camera that conceals a death-ray laser-beam.

PEW!

#7.  This random guy, whose explanation for a cartel torture-by-shark is to blame it on cartel torture-by-chainsaw.  He begins speculating to Timothy Dalton and Frank McRae about how much Columbians use chainsaws.

Then he says that they use them even more than people from Oregon.

What?  How is that a valid comparison?  Is it a logging industry reference?  Columbia and Oregon both possess a great deal of forest, though Columbia has four times the square milage of Oregon.  And if you were to pick a U.S. state that people associate with chainsaws, it'd probably be Texas.  Oh, nevermind– I get it.  It must be a handcrafted-artisanal-chainsaw-sculpture reference.

#6.  Wayne Newton as a preening televangelist cult leader.

He pulls it off wonderfully; it's no sort of stretch whatsoever.

#5.  Evil Everett McGill.

While I love "Good Everett McGill," as best depicted in "Big Ed" from TWIN PEAKS, I must say that I have a soft spot for "Evil Everett McGill," particularly as seen in SILVER BULLET and THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. Here, we get the Evil variety, and while he only has about five minutes of screen time before he is voraciously eaten by sharks, it's a fine showing.


#4.  Guest-directed by Lucio Fulci?  A man has maggots thrown in his face,

 and Bond nearly meets some eye trauma at the business end of a wall-mounted swordfish.


You will note that I just basically described every Lucio Fulci film.

#3.  Even in 1989, the "80s Rule of Pools" is still in effect.  I've written about this elsewhere, but the idea is that if A., a swimming pool exists, then B., someone fully clothed must be pushed into it, arms flailing.

It's simply the 80s Rule of Pools, Mr. Bond.

#2.  Benicio Del Toro.  Fresh off his first film appearance as "Duke the Dog-Faced Boy" in BIG-TOP PEE WEE, Del Toro really sinks his teeth into "Dario," a lesser cartel henchman.

For whatever reason, I think he's wearing the same black blazer and red shirt he wears six years later in THE USUAL SUSPECTS:

though by 1995, he no longer looks as much like a member of Menudo, which is a shame in its own right.

#1.  Robert Davi (and his pet Iguana).
 
I don't have much to add here, other than to point out the Iguana is wearing a diamond choker.  Davi acts throughout as if he's in a hard-R-rated drug war flick and not a mass-market James Bond movie, and his frightening presence comprises much of what makes this film so memorable.  It's probably also why this film created the largest gap (it would be six years until Bond returned in GOLDENEYE) in the Bond franchise since its inception!

–Sean Gill
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Television Review: CELEBRITY BOWLING: BORGNINE/HARVEY VS. MARTIN/IRELAND (1972, Don Bucola)

April 4, 2015, 7:25 am
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Stars: 3 of 5.
Running Time: 23 minutes.
Tag-line:  "The game in which Hollywood's biggest stars do what millions of Americans do every day... have a good time bowling."
Notable Cast or Crew:  Dick Martin (LAUGH-IN, NEWHEART) and John Ireland (SPARTACUS, RED RIVER) vs. Laurence Harvey (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE ALAMO) and Ernie Borgnine (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY).  Hosted by Jed Allan (LASSIE, ICE STATION ZEBRA).
Best One-liner: "The concentration of Ernie Borgnine, right here... (trails off)"

I'd like to send Ernest Borgnine week out with a bang.  Er, nevermind: make that a whimper.

CELEBRITY BOWLING is a peculiar beast.  Created by Joe Siegman and hosted by Jed Allan, it ran for seven years (1971-1978).  Each episode featured four (washed-up) celebrity non-bowlers facing off at lanes constructed in the shadowy, spartan gloom of KTTV studios.

The visuals are quite striking.


This is the host, Jed Allan.  I know you don't care.

There's all sorts of ancillary rules about who bowls first and, later,  celebrities will routinely finish each other's frames according to the whims of Jed Allan.  All of this is being played, not for charity, but for the benefit of one or two random audience members who will receive prizes of varying quality based on the scores.  If they score a 150, an audience member gets a stereo; if over 180, they get a microwave; if more than 210, a car.  But don't worry––no one is bowling more than 210.  Hell, it's tough enough for these people to crack a hundred.  For the lower scores they receive more realistic prizes, like a piece of luggage or a pair of pants.

Not even joking.

The production value is incredibly low-rent; it's all stark bright lights and empty black backgrounds.  Large portions of the show proceed in silence and often the only noise is the constant putt-putt-putt of the improperly maintained bowling ball retrieval machine (Allan is frequently reminding the stars "Hey, watch it there––don't pinch your fingers!"). Occasionally this is interrupted by unenthusiastic applause while some television actor lobs gutter balls.

Today's episode features comedian Dick Martin and Western actor John Ireland versus Manchurian Candidate Laurence Harvey and Wild Bunchie Ernie Borgnine.  I really like that they refer to him as "Ernie" Borgnine throughout.  And I apologize in advance that I'll be giving the short shrift to John Ireland and Dick Martin; this is Ernest Borgnine week, after all.
 
John Ireland and Dick Martin are bad bowlers...

 
...but not as bad as Ernest Borgnine and Laurence Harvey.

I love Laurence Harvey––here, he's looking gawky (referred to by Allan as "the human pretzel") and showing off what a terrible bowler he is.




Most of the show is Laurence and Ernie slowly walking back from a terrible frame with legitimately pissed off expressions on their faces while Jed Allan mutters, "He was putting a little too much tug in there!" or "He couldn't really get behind that one, could he?"  Why didn't the producers let them get in a practice round or two first?  Were they really that afraid they'd have to give away a free pair of pants?

Grizzled and unkempt, Borgnine looks as though a week-long bender was interrupted by the producers of CELEBRITY BOWLING, who only gave him enough time to change out of his robe and slippies before they slapped him on your television screen. 

Borgnine does this little flourish when he bowls, lifting his arm to the heavens like he's conducting a symphony.





The Gutter Ball Symphony: Lane 1, Opus 1.

Ordinarily jovial, I cannot emphasize how crabby Borgnine is.  He rarely speaks, and when he does, it's muttering bitterly off-camera about––no joke––"One day you're a star, and the next, you're a bum..." or "'Golf' spelled backwards is 'flog'; how would you spell this backwards?"  His finest moment is when he bowls a spare. 

Not quite a strike, Ernie.

When John Ireland rolls a gutter ball, Ernie peevishly growls "Do exactly what he did!" to Dick Martin.  To this, Allan says, "You're all heart, Ernie."
 
The frames proceed pretty badly for our buddies Laurence and Ernie, and, at their lowest moment, when they're beyond the point of no return and cannot possibly win, Allan announces:  "Ladies and gentlemen, in case you forgot, the two gentlemen up at bat now are both Oscar winners.  How 'bout that?"  This is followed by half-hearted applause.

The best (worst?) part is that Laurence Harvey never won an Oscar, he was only nominated for ROOM AT THE TOP.  Nice fact-checking, guys!

But Laurence takes it in stride.

The final score is 116 to 93.

Borgnine painfully laughs and says the scores are so low, they should probably take the audience out to dinner.  The crowd claps at this, and he says, "I don't think we deserve all that applause for those awful scores."  He really means it.

Ultimately, the winning audience member (representing John and Dick) receives a Spiegel catalogue gift certificate (for a conspicuously unspecified amount––it could have been $1) and a "watch."  The audience member who represented Laurence and Ernie receives the consolation prize of a bowling ball and a bag to hold it in.  Hopefully it was one that was lying around the set already.

Before we cut to black, Laurence and Ernie contemplate the ignominy that is CELEBRITY BOWLING.

But they were gluttons for punishment:  Ernie came back to bowl twice more on the series, and Laurence once.

As bleak as it was, I enjoyed this.  Three stars. 

–Sean Gill
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Film Review: LEONARD PART 6 (1987, Paul Weiland & Bill Cosby)

April 9, 2015, 9:22 am
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Stars: –1 of 5.
Running Time: 85 minutes.
Tag-line: "His daughter is engaged to a man old enough to be his father. His estranged wife behaves like she is younger than their daughter. And now his government has asked him to save the world. Again."
Notable Cast or Crew: Bill Cosby, Tom Courtenay (BILLY LIAR, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO), Joe Don Baker (THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS, CAPE FEAR '91), Moses Gunn (SHAFT, FIRESTARTER, THE NEVERENDING STORY), Gloria Foster (NOTHING BUT A MAN, THE MATRIX), Anna Levine (UNFORGIVEN, TRUE ROMANCE), Grace Zabriskie (TWIN PEAKS, WILD AT HEART), Victoria Rowell (THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS, HERMAN'S HEAD).
Best One-liner: No.

About fifteen years ago, I started to really get into "so bad they're good" movies from the 1980s and began to research the canon in earnest.  I assembled a "to-see" list that grew with more and more titles each year, though I still have the original short-list.  It's filled with films that have become personal favorites, like TROLL 2, CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC, THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS: THE MOVIE, REVENGE OF THE NINJA, THE APPLE, and DEATH WISH 3; plus loads of others that have fascinated and entertained, like MAC AND ME, MOONWALKER, and HOWARD THE DUCK.  I went back to the list last month and saw that I had crossed off every title: except for... LEONARD PART 6.

This week, against my better judgment, I finally saw it.   Imagine the scene from PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, when Pee-Wee is saving the animals from the burning pet store.  Each time he goes back in, he sees the snakes, wrinkles his nose, and moves on to a different animal.  But eventually he must grab the snakes.  They're the last animal he saves, and, screaming, he emerges from the pet store and collapses on the ground, fists full of snakes.  That's LEONARD PART 6 in a nutshell.

LEONARD PART 6––conceived, co-written, produced by and starring Bill Cosby at the height of his fame and power––is a glimpse into a disjointed, agitated mind, and like how MOONWALKER reveals a bizarre slice of Michael Jackson's soul, or how THE ROOM shows us Tommy Wiseau's, or how HAUSU shows us Nobuhiko Obayashi's, it is similarly illuminating.  However, the major difference is these latter three films function as entertainment––unhinged, mind-blowing, spit-take-inducing entertainment, but entertainment nonetheless.  LEONARD PART 6 is not entertainment.  It's an echo chamber, an optical illusion, a complex delusion, a tower of self-congratulating sanctimony, built, brick by brick, on the backs of sycophants and yes men.  I exclaimed aloud at several points, "Was this even made by human beings?"

Ostensibly, LEONARD PART 6 is the sixth film in a fictitious, James-Bond-style series; a spoof of secret agent films, populated by groan-inducing non-sequiturs and a peculiar, enduring sense of self-importance.  It builds cartoonish villains out of animal rights activists/vegetarians and has the gall to possess a superior, priggish attitude toward female nudity (is this a reference to Lisa Bonet's appearing in ANGEL HEART against Cosby's wishes?).

The first image is a cartoon rabbit accompanied by the demonic giggling of a little girl (?)

and one of the last is a stop-motion Bill Cosby riding an ostrich away from an enormous explosion.

The film is certain that both of these are some of the funniest images committed to celluloid.  There is a sureness––Cosby's conviction in his own genius––that shines throughout, and this would make the film a vaguely skin-crawling experience even if we didn't grasp the entirety of his character.  It's clearly the work of someone who exists in complete disconnect from reality, and none of his calculated reactions to its failure (disavowing it on the late-nite talk show circuit, accepting the Razzies but only when they were marbled and gold-plated, blaming the director, buying the television rights so no one else could ever show it) can dispel this nearly Caligula-esque notion that he is a god of entertainment, and that the movie-going public are supporting figures in his fantasy, a chorus of cardboard cut-outs that exist to worship Cosby, and only worship.

Pictured: evidence for the above sentiment.

There's really not much more to say, but I have a few quick observations, some of which shed light on the Cosby psyche:

#1.  Legendary character actors Grace Zabriskie and Joe Don Baker briefly appear as CIA higher-ups in a smoke-filled room.
They survive the proceedings with most of their dignity intact, even when Grace must say a line like "How do we strike back against ferocious fish?"  A friend of mine lamented that Grace and Joe Don never got the chance to do WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, and I have to wholeheartedly agree.  

#2.  What is "an executive producer for Mr. Cosby?"
 
This credit is not listed on IMDb.  Cosby himself is listed as "Producer" in the same stretch of credits; and Steve Sohmer was the then-President and CEO of Columbia Pictures.  Did Cosby insist on this bizarre, self-aggrandizing credit because he didn't want audiences to perceive that anyone outranked him? 

#3. Cosby, as a restaurant owner, going out of his way and beyond his job description to personally mix and pour a parfait dessert-drink for a female patron.  Ugh.

#4.  Cosby sneaking out of a woman's home while she lays in the background, comatose.

 #5.  Cosby using a queen bee as a sexual tool to distract a roomful of killer drones.  He begins by mumbling to her, "All right, lady, you get in there and show 'em your garter."

He unleashes the queen, and lasciviously whispers, "Don't mind if I look, do you?"

And proceeds, for an uncomfortable span, to make kissy-lips and buzzing noises.  I would argue that this would be just as creepy if I'd seen this for the first time in 1987.

#6.  The set-up for Leonard's personal life is that his wife left him years ago over a "hilarious" incident where he was found with a nude nineteen-year-old girl, beating her with a birch branch.  It's unclear if she was conscious at the time.  He has the following exchange with his loyal butler (the brilliant Tom Courtenay, who didn't deserve this):







Look at the expressions that play across Cosby's face.  One wonders if similar, rationalizing exchanges with the help have transpired in real life.

Negative stars.
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Only now does it occur to me... THE LAST OF SHEILA

April 14, 2015, 7:54 am
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Only now does it occur to me... that I can't decide what the most bizarre moment is in THE LAST OF SHEILA––is it super young Ian McShane ("Al Swearingen" on DEADWOOD) playing around with freaky hand puppets:

is it James Mason surrounded by Shirley Temple-wannabes on set of a dog meat commercial (hopefully they mean dog food):

or is it James Coburn in full hag-drag, looking like Bette Davis in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?:


The less you know going in the better, though I must say this movie is a wonderfully mean-spirited whodunit; dark, labyrinthine, and hilarious. It seems almost too strange to really exist: with a screenplay by Broadway's Stephen Sondheim and PSYCHO's Anthony Perkins, based on the real-life scavenger hunt/murder mystery parties they would host across Manhattan in the 60s; flamboyant, evocative direction by Herbert Ross (FOOTLOOSE, STEEL MAGNOLIAS); and starring an absurdly eclectic cast (the aforementioned James Coburn, James Mason, and Ian McShane as well as Raquel Welch, Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett and a closing credits song by Bette Midler?!).  If any of this appeals to you, then, hoo-boy––you gotta check this out.
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VISIT GRAND CANYON and FANNY THE FRUGAL FOODIE at 420 Fest

April 16, 2015, 9:19 am
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Two new short films of mine, VISIT GRAND CANYON (a paranoid travelogue)
 
and FANNY THE FRUGAL FOODIE (a low-rent cooking show starring Jillaine Gill),
 
will be debuting on Monday, April 20th, as a part of Video Mass' 420 Fest: Higher Channels, described as "an evening of late night cable television programming with a particularly dazed demographic in mind."  (Previous fests have included Spooky Fest I, Spooky Fest II, Love Fest, and Flux Fest.)

The screenings will be held at Videology (308 Bedford Avenue) in Brooklyn, tickets are five dollars and are available here, and the entire program will be screening four times: at 7:00 PM, 8:30 PM, 10:15 PM, and 12:00 AM.  Hope to see some of you there!
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"420 Fest: Higher Channels" Screening Tonight

April 20, 2015, 9:39 am
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420 Fest Trailer from Carl Conway Maguire on Vimeo.

Described as "an evening of late night cable television programming with a particularly dazed demographic in mind,"Video Mass' 420 Fest will be screening tonight at at Videology (308 Bedford Avenue) in Brooklyn.  

Among the more than 25 short films will be two by yours truly, including FANNY THE FRUGAL FOODIE and VISIT GRAND CANYON.   Tickets are five dollars and available here, and the entire program will be screening four times: at 7:00 PM, 8:30 PM, 10:15 PM, and 12:00 AM.
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Only now does it occur to me... THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD

April 23, 2015, 8:27 am
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Only now does it occur to me... that even in a movie where he's in a wheelchair,

Note the wig.

Christopher Walken manages to shoehorn in... a dance sequence!


Granted, it's via a short-lived flashback, but boy oh boy does the man love to dance.

In all, THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE DEAD is sort of a mediocre "Guys Doing a Job" crime movie, injected with 90s indie quirkiness and a slightly out-of-place existential tone.  Clearly, the Weinsteins were trying to capture some Tarantino-ish lightning in a bottle once again, but it doesn't quite take.   However, the Guys Doing the Job are a terrific ensemble, as Andy Garcia assembles a team that includes trailer trash William Forsythe, sporting rainbow-colored tattoos and looking like his character from STONE COLD:

Christopher Lloyd as a crabby porno theater projectionist who's always complaining about how he just "lost a toe!":

Treat Williams as a psychotic ex-boxer and current funeral home employee who trains using corpses as punching bags:


and Bill Nunn, shot from low angles like his character Radio Raheem from DO THE RIGHT THING:

Bill Nunn in Denver...

...and Bed-Stuy.

Plus, we got Fairuza Balk as a streetwalker

doing that same sassy/punk/smartass thing she does in almost every 90s movie, but that's why we love her.

And closing it out over here is Steve Buscemi as "Mister Shhh," the master hitman––
 
who feels more like a character from a Rodriguez film instead of this one, but I s'pose that's fine, too. 

In all, a 90s curiosity that's far from essential viewing––but it does function as a tremendous repository of bizarre and brilliant acting choices.
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